Cooling start-up Cryorig announces first product

Cryorig, a newcomer to the market, has announced plans to launch its début R1 heatsink in January followed by a more powerful R1 Ultimate in February.

The cooling market just got a little larger with the announcement of the Cryorig R1 dual-tower cooler from the eponymous Taiwanese start-up, founded just five months ago.

While the company itself is brand-spanking new, the team behind it claims years of research - having started work on developing new heatsink designs back in the early 2000s. The company boasts employees who have previously worked for or with well-known brands including Phanteks, Prolimatech and Thermalright, as well as experience of the overclocking and modding communities - so you'd expect plenty from its début product.

At first glance, the Cryorig R1 certainly ticks some buzzword boxes. Based around a dual-tower design, the heatsink features seven 6mm heatpipes soldered into the centre of a pair of two-tone aluminium fin stacks. The company claims to use what it calls DirectCompress Soldering, a method of connecting the heatpipes which results in a claimed 10 per cent increase in surface area contact for improved heat transfer.

The trademarked techniques continue with the heatpipes themselves, which are arranged in a staggered layout dubbed Heatpipe Convex-Align. Another trademarked design can be found in the dual-section tower stacks, which include a 2.4mm gap between the front fins reducing to 1.8mm at the rear fins - an airflow-boosting technique the company has chosen to call the Jet Fin Acceleration System.

Cryorig isn't done with the trademarks there, though. The act of spreading the heatpipes out from the nickel-plated copper base - hardly unique to the Cryorig R1 - gets a trademark of its own as the company's Heatsink Displacement Optimisation technique, while the own-brand fans include High Precision Low Noise (HPLN) sleeve bearings and detachable Acoustic Vibration Absorbers - or rubber pads to you and me.

Finally, the company has a last trademark up its sleeve - and a patent in pending, too - in the form of the MultiSeg Quick Mount System which claims compatibility with all current Intel LGA and AMD socket types.

The Cryorig R1 is designed to be used with a pair of fans - a 140mm, 13mm-thick 65CFM unit dubbed the XT140 at the front and a thicker 25.4mm XF140 offering 76CFM in the centre - and weighs a total of 1,181g when both are fitted. Overall, the heatsink measures 140mm wide by 130mm deep and is 168.3mm high with a 41.5mm motherboard-to-fin gap. The company has also announced plans to launch an R1 Ultimate which replaces the thinner XT140 with a full-size XF140 and adds an extra mounting bracket for optional third fan at the rear of the tower.

Sadly, there's one thing Cryorig isn't yet sharing: the price. The company has confirmed plans to launch the standard Cryorig R1 in January and the Cryorig R1 Ultimate in February 2014, both with the global markets in their sights. More details are available on the official website.

Unless they're aiming for low-mid market, sleeve bearings aren't anything I'd be mentioning. Maybe they should have skipped some of the brainstorming sessions to come up with names for their Fancy Trademarked Technology and gotten about sourcing some ball bearing fans?

The more marketing speak I see from a company, the lower my expectations get. Given this versus a company that gives the equivalent of "they're heatpipes, what do you want from me?", I'll go with the latter every single time. Or at least show what you can do before your marketing guys leave a trail of slimy sales-grease all down my monitor.